As a full time person of leisure, I have been trying for long to convince my diligent family that I am indeed supremely content with my idle life. But who wants to listen to a rat who's not in the race? Perhaps they will believe a philosopher. Mark Kingwell explains:
Mark 1: So what makes that idling rather than work?
Mark 2: Enjoying it for its own sake, for one thing. The reason idling is often closely associated with aestheticism or even dandyism - Baudelaire, Huysmans, Stevenson and Wilde were all accomplished idlers - is that idling sees the possibilities of life being lived as a work of art.
Mark 1: Hmm. Is that what distinguishes idling from slacking?
Mark 2: Yes, exactly! The problem with the slacker is that he is, in the very act of resisting them, wedded to the norms of work. In avoiding work, or pretending to work, or hiding from the supervisor in the mailroom, the slacker is implicitly granting the world of work a dominant position. He gives work power as that which he should be doing even as he does not do it.
Mark 1: And idling?
Mark 2: Idling establishes an independent scale of value. It's like the difference between dozing - falling asleep from overwork - and napping, which we all know is an art form. The true idler enters the moment of not-working and takes it into a new realm of not even thinking about work, of strolling away from that collective addiction of the past 2,000 years.
....
Mark 1: Huh. But surely idle hands are the devil's work. You don't have to be a hard-line Calvinist to appreciate that people need things to occupy them, limits and purposes. Otherwise they fall into ennui or worse.
Mark 2: True, all art is about the tension between constraint and possibility, between discipline and freedom. But work is too often deadening rather than purposeful; that's why it cycles with boredom. We should get over this perverse need to locate people in work terms, to fix them under occupations, the way English proper names make identities: Smith, Cooper, Fletcher. When you meet someone at a party, don't ask "What do you do?" Instead ask, "What are you thinking about?"
Wishing everyone a Happy New Year. Hope you will enjoy many an idle moment in 2009.
(link to Mark Kingwell's comments via Brian Leiter; image of Woman Resting on a Pillow via Indian Contemporary Art)
Dear Ruchira Di,
Wish you and your family a very happy and prosperous new year. Meeting you in 2008 after so many years was indeed an achievement for all of us.
Cheers and best wishes,
Rajeeb
Posted by: Rajeeb Banerjee | January 01, 2009 at 02:19 AM
Happy New Year to AB and its originator! I'd be converted to the idle life in a New York minute, but one of its key ingredients is missing...
Posted by: Elatia Harris | January 01, 2009 at 03:29 PM
Great post -- I'll definitely plan to modify my cocktail party banter accordingly.
Posted by: Andrew Rosenblum | January 06, 2009 at 04:01 PM